RAIN AND SNOW:
Films with Live Music
Saturday, December 13, 2025 8pm
Automata’s Experimental Sound Series TAPETAIL presents a film screening with live music, where each film’s soundtrack will be performed in real time by invited musicians. The program centers on Black and White films suited to a December night—wintery, reflective, and slightly nostalgic.
The films include Lotte Reiniger’s works from the early 1930s (animated silhouettes/stop-motion style pieces), Dez minutos de Mozart (1930) and Papageno (1935), alongside the 1929 Dutch experimental film Regen (Rain). Each film will be paired with a musician whose compositional approach suits its tone and visual language.
Kevin Chan will perform the score for Regen using modular synthesizers, an approach that mirrors the film’s fluid structure and rhythmic play with weather and movement. Mason Moy will score the Reiniger films; he has extensive experience creating live scores for cinema, and will draw on a small ensemble drawn from his “string band” to bring warmth, gesture, and tactility to the animated works.
The final film is a contemporary contribution by Hermetic Fever—the trumpet, guitar, and electronics duo of Louis Lopez and Josh Gerowitz. Because their music tends to conjure visual associations on its own, they’ve created an original film for this event, combining Super 8 footage with images of snow and other wintry themes. Together these elements make the evening feel curated for the season: historical and newly-made films, music that is responsive and live, and a sense of winter as something imagined, remembered, and scored in real time.
About the Artists:
Mason Moy is a tubist, bass trombonist, and composer currently in Los Angeles, CA. He frequently makes music exploring extended just intonation, free improvisation, and occasionally using Supercollider.
He has commissioned solo tuba pieces by Wolfgang von Schweinitz and Jack Herscowitz. Mason has performed with Synchromy, the Angel City Jazz Festival, wildUp, and Monday Evening Concerts, as well as performed the US premiere Ellen Arkbro’s Clouds for tuba trio at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco. He currently plays in the brass quartet Diapason, which focuses on performing long-form drone pieces by composer Sarah Davachi.
His compositions focus primarily on the use of extended just intonation to push the limits of tonal music. His music has been programmed across the United States by the Hear Now Festival, the James Madison University Wind Ensemble, Kevin Stees, Matt LeVeque, and the Los Angeles Brass Alliance.
Kevin Chan is a multimedia artist based in California. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, he currently lives in Los Angeles. While studying at Loyola Marymount University, what started as a passion for photography led to explorations into animation and 3D modeling, video, motion graphics, graphic design, illustration, web design, and more.
Hermetic Fever is Josh Gerowitz and Louis Lopez, a project inspired by the Hermetic tradition of philosophy, practical magic, potions, and alchemy.
Hermetic Fever shared interest in the power of transformation through fermentation, dialectic, and improvisation fuels their musical process.
Tapetail is Automata’s new experimental sound series, launched in October 2022.
Tapetail presents live events and sound installations featuring the work of experimental sound artists.
We are currently looking to present shows and installations that deal with "liveness" where something about the experience is best presented live, whether through improvisation, special acoustic treatment or audience experience. There’s been a lot of great art happening in the virtual and digital world so now we’re turning our focus back towards bringing people together for sound experiences that are best experienced in a live setting.
Automata’s Tapetail series
is curated by Cassia Streb.
If you are interested in proposing work for the Tapetail series,
please fill out this short query form.